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Intel's 4004 Microprocessor Turns 40
harrymcc writes "On November 15th 1971, Intel introduced the 4004 — the first single-chip microprocessor. Its offspring, needless to say, went on to change the world. But first, Intel tried using the 4004 in a bunch of products that were interesting but often unsuccessful — like a pinball machine, an electronic vote-counting machine, and Wang's first word processor. Technologizer's Benj Edwards is celebrating the anniversary with an illustrated look back at this landmark chip." Here's another nostalgic look back at V3.co.uk, and one at The Inquirer. And an anonymous reader points out another at ExtremeTech, from which comes this snippet: "Designed by the fantastically-forenamed Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stanley Mazor, the 4004 was a 4-bit, 16-pin microprocessor that operated at a mighty 740KHz — and at roughly eight clock cycles per instruction cycle (fetch, decode, execute), that means the chip was capable of executing up to 92,600 instructions per second. We can’t find the original list price, but one source indicates that it cost around $5 to manufacture, or $26 in today’s money."
Oh wait, that was something else...
Nearly 70 and doing everything I can to avoid a computer for my entire retirement?
You miss the Kurzweil reference, if medical progress keeps pace, 70 will be young.
I think the half-way mark 1991 makes an interesting reference point: in 1991, my desktop PC at work cost 2 months salary, it was a 16MHz 386 with a 640x480 resolution 15" color monitor. My desktop PC at work today cost about 3 days pay and is a 2+GHz i5 with two 1920x1080 24" flat panels.
http://www.4004.com/
In particular, that fully-functional 4004 mock-up someone made by using 1G TTL chips on a large circuit board is absolutely awesome.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Obligatory:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of zero cost 4004s....
I still have a Radio Shack EC-4004 programmable calculator floating around that uses one of these. Fun little calculator for its time.
Hey, what happened to all the Apple fans saying the Motorola chips where better?
I don't know, but this is surely cool:
http://www.visual6502.org/
It's not poorly worded. The history of AMD is poorly understood (by you, not them).
Still available, although I believe they are made in Malaysia. The whole chip-set was not very expensive.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
So the value of dollar went down by over factor of 5 since 1971.
In 1971 the US Dollar was pegged to gold at $35 per Oz Its ~$1700 today. I don't remember exactly when during the Nixon administraion the US decoupled the dollar from gold but I think it was after the election in 1972. At any rate an oz of gold would about buy a 4004 in 1971 and a ~3.5GHz 6-core Xeon today.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
Good thing you got that raise!
More like, my boss in 1991 believed in the value of cutting edge hardware (more than the value of paying people anything above minimum market rate...) Today I work for a startup that supplies us from the lower end of the Dell catalog. Not that I'm complaining, the hardware is no longer the limiting factor, although I could use a third screen....
You would have been if your computer didn't run a 4004 microprocessor.
There *is* an unbroken chain of compatibility from the latest AMD processors back to the 8008, which was Intel's first 8-bit microprocessor (the design of which was actually started before the 4004 design, IIRC). So they were indeed "predecessors".
Not to mention that AMD got its start in the PC business by being an officially licensed 2nd source for Intel's 8086 chips.
We'll be in 2051.
But, you missed the business model. They already had (and sold) decoders and latches and buffers that "digital designers" were using for other purposes. This was the one chip to rule them all, one chip to find them, one chip to bring them all and in the darkness require them (thus driving sales...)
Actually, AMD processors are not 100% compatible. There are differences in behavior.
For example, everyone knows an x86 resets at FFFF:0000. But an AMD processor will throw an exception if somewhere along the line, it doesn't encounter a branch and ends up wrapping to 0000:0000. An Intel processor doesn't generate the exception. (This is because way back when, instead of putting ROM at the end of memory, designers could put it at the beginning and have the processor basically NOP its way through the 16 bytes).
It's one of the well-known well-publicized things that broke the original Xbox.
Of course, practically speaking, AMD's behaviour is probably "more correct" security wise, but Intel's is pure legacy.
...that we landed on the MOON before the invention of microprocessors! Now that's scary.
If we've come this far in 40 years, where will we be in 40 more?
CMOS process shrinks will probably poop out around 2020. Intel claims to have things figured out until 8nm. When the CMOS process shrinks cease there will be no more massive numbers of "free" transistors every year. Intel and other will likely start playing with gallium arsenide and other stuff to try to squeeze more performance out of stagnated process sizes. Once those tricks are played out it could very well be the end until radical new alternative technology is developed.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
You are thinking the wrong way.
It was used in calculators.
4bit is enough to encode 0-9. The rest was done in software (using arbitrary precission math, although for very limited values of "arbitrary", given past constrains...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Corrrect. It's probably better to describe the 4004 as BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) rather than as "four bit." Storing a number larger than 9 requires eight bits, the first four store the first digit, and the second four store the second digit. The bit patterns 0xA through 0xF were actually special patterns used for various things (like marking negative numbers).
Since the original purpose of the 4004 was a calculator, this system makes a lot of sense. It might not be the most efficient use of bits (an eight-digit decimal number uses 32 bits in BCD, but requires only 27 bits when in binary), but it makes the translation to and from human-readable formats very easy.
This is exactly how most circuits using discrete logic operated, and for the exact same reason. In fact, I'm working on a project right now that uses only discrete logic -- encoding in BCD makes the whole thing possible. Using BCD on the first microprocessor makes lots of sense as an incremental improvement on what people already did.
Although it's nice to call it CMOS, and indeed both N and P channel devices are used, all the fastest silicon processors use N channel devices for the logic path. CMOS runs about 1/4 the speed on NMOS.
My understanding of gallium arsenide MOS (and I could easily be wrong) is that its speed advantage for logic started running out at about the 0.35 micron (350 nm) node, which is where Vitesse gave up and very nearly went out of business. The future might not be silicon, but there's little change of it being GaAs.
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Why not get a Raspberry Pi and be done? If you want to play at making computer systems, I'd recommend getting into the Altera / Nios design software... I'm working on a triple core system right now with each core customized (by our team) to a particular task...
8008, 6800, and 8086
Eh? While there were a few designs using 8008 and 6800, I don't think any of them was successful; high volume commercially available PCs used Z80s (the TRS-80, the Sinclair ZX-80 and Spectrum, the MSX machines) or 6502s (Apple II, Atari, Commodore). The successor of the 6800, the excellent 6809 was used in the TRS-80 Color Computer; years later, when IBM launched their PC, they used the reduced data bus version of the 8086, that is the 8088.